December 2018

June 07, 2008

J.K. Rowling: Imagine what goes on in totalitarian states

J.K. Rowling gave a thoughtful address this week on the indispensable power of the imagination.

She told the Harvard Class of 2008 that when they consider what they might do about their fellow human beings suffering in the world’s various police states, they have a responsibility to use their imagination, and to act wisely on it.

“Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read. …

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy. …

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”

Politics of empathy. Rowling’s political statement sounded remarkably apolitical. She advised the Harvard graduates not to forget their fellow humans, to weigh the plight of the oppressed and act on empathetic judgment, to use their imagination well.

If you never experience a terrible pain, wisdom demands that you imagine it. Otherwise, you’ll let it hit you when it could have been avoided. The same is true of nations.

Give a nation twenty years of prosperity, and a third of its people will believe prosperity takes neither work nor competition. Another third will be unsure.

Give a nation twenty years of peace, and a third of its people will believe peace comes not from actively opposing enemies, but from ignoring them. Another third will be unsure.

Give a nation twenty years of freedom, and a third of its people will lose the ability to imagine the misery of a life in chains. Another third will struggle with the thought.

It is a sad irony that the success of one generation can make fools of the next. We in the Free World have been given so much that many of us have lost the feel for real pain or suffering. Somehow we’re able to play pretend, and yet too many of us have lost our imaginations.

When a third of a population lives an illusion that appeals directly to selfish cynicism, and another third is passively confused, it doesn't take much effort for the senseless to block the sensible from doing, for freedom, peace and progress, the necessary things that also happen to be hard.

Short on imagination and long on self-deception, we invite disasters easily avoided.

Unheard screams. In half the world today, there is unseen suffering, there are unheard screams, there is the desperate knowledge by billions of people that they can never say or write or act on what they believe.

You're a true dissident and freedom fighter rusty. Thank God we have such strong, brave soldiers in the fight against oppression like you, sitting at your keyboard, lamenting the tremendous horrors that you are suffering under this regime. I'm sure the dissident students in Iran, Holocaust survivors, Soviet refuseniks, and the opposition party members in Zimbabwe greatly appreciate how much you are bravely putting yourself on the line!

Rusty, if what you wrote were true, you will have been hunted down and be on your way to the torture chamber. Since this has not happened, I suggest you open your eyes and try to see the world as it really is, rather than as your ideology dictates it to be. As Dr Johnson advised Boswell, "Free your mind of cant."

Apparently Rusty lacks the imagination to visualize any torment beyond his own pathetic existence in one of the freest, most privileged environments ever to exist. If his experience here is one of opression, I would invite him to enlist in the military first (to experience a mild form of external discipline and to serve something larger than his miserable ego) and travel at their expense to some of the world's garden spots where the amenities of freedom exist only in imagination.

rusty's just mad that his tribe is not in charge. That's what people who blather about power in that context are talking about. They are oppressed because they narcissisticly believe their views should rule, and anything that prevents that is undemocratic and unfair.

That's harsh of me to say that, rusty, and you may be among the few who think as you do yet rises above that meanness of spirit (disguised as nobility). But I rather doubt it. Those who believe that those who have power can only have achieved it dishonorably operate from a deep resentment, and can imagine only that the others must be as evil as they.

Rusty, thankfully you have never met people who have been in re-education camps secretly asking you to get word to their family or seen children denied emergency medical care because their parents weren't party members-I have. America and the Americans who defend her are the last hope to change cruel dictatorships!

The very fact that people like "rusty" could hang on to such morally equivalent rubbish sort of proves J.K. Rowling's point, doesn't it? I mean, if you really believe that this country's government is no better than, say, the regime of Bashar Assad or an Idi Amin, then you must indeed suffer from an astonishing lack of empathy and imagination.

That was a very good post. Thanks for bringing Ms. Rowling's words to us. Thank you even more for your reprise of your October post. It is extraordinarily frustrating to see so many people take so much for granted that they cripple us as a nation from doing the good - imperfect as it may be - that we are capable of doing.

In case anyone had a hard time understanding what J.K. Rowling meant when she spoke of the "mental agorophobia" of those who lack the ability to imagine real oppression.

I'll just repeat her words quoted above:

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

I think I will have to steal the phrase "willfully unimaginative" -- envious that I didn't think of it myself.

"Few people have the imagination for reality." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility." -- John F. Kennedy

We should be thankful for idiots like Rusty. Without him, the small minded could simply brush aside Rawlings comments as mere fantasy and there would be no where to turn to refute the charge. If we wish to make the accusation that those living in freedom and prosperity lose the ability to imagine anything else, where would we turn to find examples of this behavior? How could we impress upon people inclined to disagree with us that in fact they too had lost that crucial imagination. The quickest defence against this charge is to claim that people like Rusty are figments of our imagination and that no real person could imagine prosperity, freedom, and security to be its opposite.

Fortunately, Rusty comes along to prove the point. To the extent that anyone has ever heard the echo of themselves in Rusty's comments, our point is well and powerfully made far beyond our own ability to prove it.

As we watch free speech wither on the vine in our Northern neighbor, we must keep in mind that our political "enemies" serve a necessary function: they keep the extremists on our side in check. Freedom of thought and the right to express it, no matter how outrageous some may consider it, is the bedrock of our society.

Well, I have to say, I really did enjoy that pile on. Right off the bat the first of the 25% spoken of up there pipes up. I thought in that moment, "Oh crap. Here we go." Thanks for the laugh. My whole world is populated with Rustys.

Thank you for that lecture J K Rowling but surely another subject that you could have addressed would have been how middle-class people can abuse the UK benefits system that was meant for the poor.
You never address this. As a single mother in Edinburhg in the early nineties you chose to live on welfare in a comfortable heated two bedroom flat in a leafy part of the city that the poor could never have aspired to.
Your well off sister was there so you were never short of family support.
It was like an artistic grant. You were luckly nobody told you to get off your bum and get a job. Thousands of liberal middle class people but for you it worked out but hey - even a stopped clock is right now and again.
How indulgent our benefits system is to the middle class. And how easy they forget it, to move onto much more colourful and globe spanning causes.

What I especially love about the Harry Potter novels of Good vs. Evil, is that the good is NOT impossibly, perfectly good. Nor even trying to be perfect (well, maybe Hermione is).

Basically, imperfectly, consistently trying to be good, and fighting against evil.

Amnesty, in focusing so much more criticism on Good but imperfect America when fighting true but not exclusively Evil, has made it more difficult for the good US to lead the world in stopping genocide. In Darfur, for instance, where Amnesty doesn't call it genocide, but Pres. Bush did.

Were it to be called genocide, that would be a call for using war to stop it -- no "genocide" label, no automatic war justification. This is the pro-dictator formula that Amnesty (and Human Rights Watch) now use to enable the terrible acts of evil that dictators continue to do.

It's a terrible shame that anti-war means accepting genocide by so many.

Don't worry too much. Nobody listens to Maxine Waters, either, and Nancy Pelosi has no intention of nationalizing energy companies.
Nancy talks a good game for the moonbat base, but she learned at the feet of real, treacherous, old masters back in Maryland (do the names Spiro Agnew and D'Alesandro ring any bells?) and she won't do anything that will actually upset the apple cart.